PROJECT SUMMARY: Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) is an inflammatory disease affecting children at an increasing rate leading to failure to thrive, esophageal stricturing, and the need for long term healthcare. Off-label use of topical steroids is the mainstay of treatment, but a high failure rate and clinical concerns of palatability have necessitated physicians using unstudied grocery items as excipients. The goal of this proposal is to investigate the properties of current empiric therapies and use that knowledge to develop a microscale polymer disc (microdiscs) designed to improve residence time of drug therapy in the esophagus. Microdiscs are designed to prolong drug residence time in the esophagus and have controlled-release properties to increase mucosal exposure to drug, thus delivering drug directly to the target site of EoE. The prolonged residence time of the mucoadhesive discs will be expected to improve bioavailability which decreases patient exposure to steroids, decreases costs, and opens new possibilities for other pharmaceutical treatments with fewer side effects to be delivered in the same manner.